Last week I heard a shuffle at my front door and saw that my building manager was slipping a notice under my door. I opened it only to read that my rent was being raised by 10%! I have lived in this cute little studio in the coveted Sunnyside Neighborhood in inner Southeast Portland for just over a year now. During this time, my rent has gone up a total of 14%. If it continues at this pace, I’ll have to find another place to live because I’ll be priced out of my very walkable, very centrally-located neighborhood.

TheWalk Score in my neighborhood is 94 and is a veritable walker’s paradise. I am only a 5 minute walk away from Fred Meyer’s and an 8 minute walk away from New Seasons. I can easily run errands by foot, includinggoing to the clinic, the bank and the post office. I live within walking distance to a lot of really great restaurants, the Bagdad Theater, and some of the best resale shops in the city. I have loved living in this neighborhood because this experience is preciselywhy I moved to Portland – the walkability,bike-ability and the vibrancy that comes along with those two things.

It used to be that what was valuable wasn’t so much how walkable your neighborhood was, but how big your house was. But more and more, a walkable lifestyle has become a premium amenity, which explains why wealthy whites have moved into the more walkable neighborhoods of Portland anddisplaced less wealthy minorities out into the more car-oriented suburban fringes of the city.

Why some people hate Salt & Straw

I have written aboutgentrification before and said that it’s both good and bad. But now that I feel the effects of it myself, I now see why it’s such an emotional tinderbox. People who are just going about their lives are having to face eviction, displacement, or just have to spend a lot more on housing if they want to stay where they are because of forces completely out of their control. In other words, you could be doing everything “right” in your life – being a responsible citizen, earning a viable income and doing your best – but it still isn’t good enough. Not unlike the tragedy of having your house destroyed by a natural phenomenon like a hurricane or a flood, you could become a victim of the “greed phenomenon” where developers look with dollar signs in their eyes at the house you live in with the intention of razing it and building a hugely profitable and expensive condo building there instead.

Now I can see why some people look at Salt & Straw with disdain. Salt & Straw is a high-end ice cream shop which is known for long lines out the door. It is the perfect symbol of gentrification because the store is usually located in new mixed-use developments on gentrified streets such as NW 23rd in the Northwest, Alberta in the Northeast and Division in the Southeast. It is also a great symbols of gentrification because of its prices. A scoop of Salt & Straw costs $3.95 and a sundae costs $8! Admittedly, Salt & Straw ice cream sells some of the best ice cream I have ever had and their flavor combinations are nothing short of genius, but this is price gouging. It gouges its prices because it can and because paying a lot for ice-cream makes people feel like the Haves instead of the Have Nots.

The ice cream divide between the Haves and the Have Nots

Places like Salt & Straw help draw the line in the sand between people who have and those who have not. The buildings and neighborhoods that places like Salt & Straw occupy also help draw that line because, increasingly, a lot of people can’t afford to live in them. For example, people who “have” can walk over to Salt & Straw from their nearby house or condo for an expensive scoop, while people who “have not” might have to drive over from a far away, more affordable neighborhood. And if they don’t have a car, they may have to take the bus. But who’s going to take the bus to go get an expensive scoop of ice-cream? And so you have a very distinctive class of people at the Salt & Straw – the Haves. While the Have Nots must content themselves with a trip to the Dairy Queen or store-bought ice-cream at home.

Bridging the gap

I like Salt & Straw, even though I can’t really afford to go there a lot. I appreciate the great ice cream and flavors they have to offer, though I balk at the prices. I even enjoy standing in line and the community feel of having to squeeze in among all the people who’re also enjoying an expensive scoop.

I don’t believe what Salt & Straw has to offer has to be exclusively available only to the wealthy. Somehow we have to transcend the ice cream divide between the Haves and Have Nots. Toward this quest, let’s look at the things that the Haves and the Have Nots share in common:

4. Neither the Haves or the Have Nots want to see Portland become a suburbanized, homogenous landscape filled with the same businesses and urban form that you could find in any other city, likewhat has happened in Vancouver, BC with its pervasive glass towers. Everyone wants Portland to keep its unique character, scale and personality.

So how can we slow the momentum of the divide, where the artists and the creatives and the DIY-ers who made Portland attractive to the yuppies that are moving in today are not displaced into far flung suburban fringes? How can we make walkable neighborhoods, the community that is generated at Salt & Straw, and the amenities that come with improved neighborhoods available to more people and not just the privileged few?

Some solutions to consider

1. Affordable housing component to new developments. Some new mixed-use developments include an affordable housing component along with market-rate housing. And some developments, like the Belmont Dairy on Belmont and SE 34th, are completely income-restricted. The great thing about affordable housing like this is that it is usually located in great, walkable neighborhoods, making that lifestyle accessible for people who have lower incomes.

2. Affordable retail component to new developments. Instead of displacing the food carts on Hawthorne and SE 12th, the developers could offer some affordable retail space in their building where some of those food carts can transition into a more permanent bricks and mortar establishment. This would be a way to incorporate the existing character of a place while allowing the city to evolve and change. Or, the developers could set aside some open space and allow the food carts to stay in the location, thereby keeping the vibrancy and community asset, but building around it.

3. Instead of demolishingcommunal houses like the Breakfast House on Division and 34th that is slated for demolition to make room for a new development, why not add density into the city of Portland while using the existing building stock? I know of a few people who have bought large single-family homes and have turned them into communal living homes, sometimes housing as many as 10 people in a comfortable, affordable and community setting. While we won’t be able tosave all the old buildings in Portland, at least we can take a more nuanced approach at incorporating density within existing buildings whenever we can instead of routinely razing old housing stock and replacing it with 4 to 5 story new-build condo developments.

4. Existing businesses can learn to adapt and take advantage of a wealthier class of consumers that are moving into their neighborhoods instead of vacating gentrified commercial districts. For example,Manny Ramirez, long time owner of Dichter Pharmacy in the Inwood neighborhood of New York City, has changed his business to attract the new residents that are moving in. He stocks expensive lotions, organic moisturizers and designer toys for the wealthier yuppies and hipsters, but also keeps prices of basics like Tylenol under chain stores to serve the lower income residents of his neighborhood.

30 Responses

One more suggestion, Taz: start lobbying your city council member. Support candidates that support rent-control or other forms of affordable housing. Be proactive to ensure that communal living is not restricted by zoning. This issue stands to become more and more urgent as income inequality grows worse.

I’m not sure if it’s best to comment here or on your blog, but here goes. Have-nots really don’t give a damn about how good the ice-cream is on a gourmet chart. They will also tend to not give a damn if it’s a locally-owned business or whether their ice cream is made from non-hormone organic milk. For this reason, chains like Baskin Robbins or even Thrifty ice cream will be just fine for most. Are you personally floating between the Haves and the Have-nots? I felt this same thing in San Francisco in the late 70s. I would interact with two groups of people; those that could afford their lifestyle and those desperate to have the trappings of a lifestyle more expensive than they could afford. The rest lived somewhere in the Bay Area(and not Oakland). It was a privileged group who could live in the city and afford the fun stuff the city offered.

Careful with the assumptions, Steve. I can’t speak for everyone any better than you can, but I am a have-not stuck on the geographical fringes who has to spend more in gas to get to Salt & Straw an it costs to buy a sundae. For that reason, Salt will never be a solo destination, but even if I’m in the area for some reason and it’s the only place in town that makes a dairy-free (damned food allergies hit all classes) ice cream that doesn’t taste like chemicals, I’m still not going to try it because my budget doesn’t let me spend that much money on ice cream.

Salt & Straw can charge what they want. I don’t see their books. I don’t know if they’re gouging. That I won’t be able to try a scoop unless a friend is buying isn’t the point of this reply. I am among the have-nots, and I understand, appreciate, and desire locally-sourced, organic, fairly traded, locally owned, sustainable products just as much as anyone. Thrifty (WinCo in my case, but same difference) is NOT just as good, it’s what I can afford, knowing here’s so much out there I would rather be eating. Poor does not mean uneducated or unaware. We aren’t all that hillbilly family on The Simpsons.

I don’t want the trappings of a higher lifestyle. I do want healthy food that I can afford and while ice cream should be an occasional treat for all of us, I do want ice cream made from natural ingredients I can produce, not the crap they sell at the bargain grocery store that’s made out of who knows what.

Exactly what CM says, being in the have-not category does not automatically mean you are ignorant. Your comment Steve reminds me of that ridiculous article that was written bashing “hipsters” for daring to use food stamps to shop at Whole Foods, how dare people try to eat healthy, non-GMO produce. This is the problem of our future, as Thomas Piketty has pointed out in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the wealth that the upper 1% is inheriting alone is creating a landed gentry in America. It is time to push back against this and fight for our right to survive.

You seem to fail to realize that people such as yourself moving here in droves is precisely why the rents are going up. Try being a 4th generation Portlander who cannot afford the rent in the fun walkable neighborhoods she grew up in. I have experienced every quadrant of Portland become gentrified and over priced from NW 23rd to Alberta to Sellwood. 30,000 people move here every single year. I wish people would work to make their cities more livable rather than making mine unlivable.

I’ll explain why “gentrification” is even a thing in Portland: because quarter-life crisis survivors like you keep moving here in nauseating droves.

You’ve been here for less than two years and you want to boohoo that you can’t live near Hawthorne anymore? I’m naive Oregonian, in Portland since 2000. My friends grew up in those neighborhoods and they got priced out long ago by lifestyle tourists like you. Fuck you. Go back to where you came from.

So you didn’t grow up in Portland–what makes you any more entitled to living here than others? This kinda sounds like the same attitude anti-immigration folks have on a national scale. And ironically, Oregon used to belong to Mexico, and before that, it belonged to the Native Americans.

So many of the businesses, restaurants, and art and cultural elements that attract so many newcomers are generated by non-Oregonians. Although I’m not a native Oregonian, I can totally see how frustrating all this is for you. I moved here from Florida almost a decade ago, and spent most of my time in the inner SE area, and hell, it’s hard for ME to see the neighborhood change so much. For better or worse, we live in a highly migratory culture within the U.S.–people are settling less within their own “villages” and moving around the U.S.. Portland isn’t the only place feeling these growing pains right now.

I grew up in Portland and have a great deal of contempt for transplants that have snooty attitudes towards natives that were raised here. There are plenty of local artists that were making the city vibrant long before all these Portlandia migrants started infecting the city with their hipsterish elitism. They are part of the problem. The other aspect is our municipal policymakers and their hyperdevelopment agenda. They need to be accountable to ALL the the people not just wealthy elitist transplants. Affordable housing and rent controls should be part of the agenda, not just a**kissing to out of state developers who bilk tax subsidies at the expense of the local citizen. I miss the Portland of the 90s, when it was still a little rough around the edges but artists could afford to live here. If anything, out of state transplant artists moved here in the first place because of the Do It Yourself credo. Now its all generic piffle.I miss the Portland of my childhood when it was clean downtown and you hardly saw graffiti in the SE urban neighborhoods. I miss when it was less crowded and there were more locally owned family businesses that have all been now pushed out due to the increased rents. I hate Salt and Straw because of what it symbolizes, that these neighborhoods no longer belong to the people but to the gentrified masses.

I was out shooting some photos of the architecturally gawdawful Grand Canyon Division has become. Lived on Clinton since 1995 and never expected this to happen. Really sad for the folks who bought homes here decades ago, many of them older, who now have to compete with newcomers for a reasonably convenient street parking spot and deal with the loss of one of the last truly cool neighborhoods in SE. Say what you will. Yet another nice, calm SE neighborhood is going away.

Building managers rarely slip notices under doors, Oregon landlord tenant law requires that it be taped to the main entrance of the dwelling. Also rent raises have nothing to do with gentrification. It has to do with the rental market. The property I live at in the suburbs is routinely raising rent 100 dollars on a 800 dollar a month apt. People can’t afford homes but the economy is stabilizing, therefore there is an increase in renters. Supply vs demand.

We all have to accept :CHANGE. I’ve lived in a PDX 30 years and watched how the neighborhoods have changed. I finally closed my business on Hawthorne because my landlord raised the rent every year $100. Last year it moved up $150 more a month. I said goodbye and another retailer moved in. That’s life. Portland is going to change. Get used to it. This gentrification started with the black neighborhood in n.e. now you see what it feels like to be pushed out.

Truthfully. I am extremely unimpressed with Salt and Straw and think their ice cream is inedible. The same goes with Voodoo Doughnuts, I would pay real money NOT to eat them. Portland is going through a boom time right now, it won’t last as much as those cashing in think it will. There just isn’t enough big companies, retirees, trust-fund babies and software engineers to keep it growing the rate it is. Some large real-estate developers told me the place is being over-built, and from what I see I believe they are correct. Portland growth will slow down and perhaps bust times will happen again within 5 years.

It’s quite bemusing to read pretty much the same article on Portland over & over again since at least 2001. Having lived (and I was lucky enough to buy property) near Alberta St since 1999, living in PDX since 1995 – you bet I’ve seen it.

Here’s the deal w/ rent increases. “Gentrification” is an easy, but lazy catch all phrase. In essence it’s what people use when they can’t or won’t dig deeper. Rents keep going up due to lack of supply due to a flood of new residents and home owners who take rentals off the market in “hot” areas, coupled with increasing demand & shifts in population. Add to this a severe increase in costs for landlords – my water, utilities, prop taxes, insurance, costs of Maint person have all increased in the past two years. Add to this standard 3.5 % yearly inflation & well duh, of course rents are going up.

And I’ll be honest, a lot of people don’t care. Property owners are doing well, the city loves the taxes & additional development it brings. Many call booming rentals, “success”. Until there’s some kind of giant NYC style mass of renter organizing & successful lobbying, renters are going to be SOL.

Then there’s the little issue of what can legally be changed & what can’t. Good luck w/ rental control. Or telling a property owner what they can do w/ their properties, especially in a state that has in our constitution legal mandates to increase density in cities in order to protect open space & farmland. & people buy & develop properties to make money. That’s how it works. So, although the above suggestions are cute in that young person wide eyed change the world kind of way. Sorry, they just aren’t going to happen.

That’s not just a Portland thing. NYT recently reported on people (young professionals) being priced out of down Detroit (Detroit!).

It’s not a great time for renters in the US overall.

As for the ice cream. I live near there. If douchecanoes want to wait in line for 40 min for an $8 scoop of ok ice cream. Go for it. If you want decent cheaper ice cream Tonalli’s donuts right up the street does a great job.

We forget that “gentrification” has as many positives for cities as it does negatives: stabilized neighborhoods, preserved older & historic properties, thriving retail corridors, increased tax bases in cities. I for one will certainly take the Portland of today over the moldy, decaying, but yeah cheap as Cleveland it was when I moved here in the 1990s. So will so many others. They keep moving here because of places like Salt & Straw. Not due to cheap rent.

oh I pity the upwardly mobile professionals being priced out of downtown Detroit. Maybe now they can empathize with the native Detroiters who’d lost their jobs and homes. The volume of abandoned homes in the greater Detroit metro area is testament to that. Ever been to Roseville or 8mile? Maybe those urban professionals can move there.

U mad. Seriously this is a fight that has been going on for YEARS. You are a minnow. The native portlanders who were able to stick around are the ones developing and profiting from development so chill. Just cuz you just got here & don’t have any connections doesn’t warrant any change in the game. My 50yo aunts and uncles were fighting this their whole lives. You have to either find a way to survive & be happy with it or leave. Believe me. Nobody knows the pain of s&s gentrification like I do, they took over the bakery space that my great grandma started and roses then bought and My gma made sore we were raised on roses layer cake. I do understand this as needing outlet to bitch about rent going up. But if you want results you really have to do so much more. Everyone has a strong opinion about this. But luckily we can learn from years if portlanders before is who have left us with knowledge of co housing and gardening and love and respect for everyone. Even those ppl u hate who are costing u bc otherwise we turn into grouchy east coasters and nobody wants that shit out here. Xoxo!

There is a meeting today at 3:00 p.m. of the Portland Housing Advisory Commission 421 SW 6th Street, Steel Bridge Conference Room. They are going to talk about affordable housing and legislation. I’m going because I live in an affordable units and have been fighting to keep my place.

Also, anyone who may be interested. A job opening as director of Community Alliance of Tenants — and organization that could use some teeth. http://oregoncat.org

Here is a response I received after I emailed everybody and their brother regarding the need for RENT CONTROL:
” We received several of your emails regarding your situation and affordable housing in general. Our office receives a great deal of constituent correspondence, so our apologies you are just getting a response now. The Commissioner is extremely concerned about the recent trend in rent increases and the demolition of what is currently affordable housing into new higher-rent properties.

While a rent control measure would be the simplest way to address this problem, the state has prohibited local governments from enacting rent controls. See Oregon Revised Statute 91.225 (2) (http://www.oregonlaws.org/ors/91.225): “a city or county shall not enact any ordinance or resolution which controls the rent that may be charged for the rental of any dwelling unit.”

I understand a lot of the frustration expressed here, but there are a lot of different perspectives to consider. My wife is a native Portlander, and she supports the development. I’ve been living car-free in that neighborhood for the 14+ years I’ve been in Portland. I like to see the development from a walkability aspect, but wish there were fewer gourmet restaurants and more that catered to families and regular folks. I also started out as a Have Not, and made my way up to being a “Have” through hard work and a bit of luck. All while living in the same neighborhood. It’s a struggle and the early years were very tough, but it’s entirely possible to make it work.

This is a great topic Taz and I appreciate your proximity to this issue in whatever degree, as well as everyone else’s. This is clearly a hot topic because people are dealing with a few issues; the perceived home (community), actual home ownership (property taxes), capitalistic mechanics (rent/leases/mortgages), and potentially racial issues (neighborhood cleansing/improvement/safety).

And I know Taz you have seen or studied this sort of situation all over the world, even in places like Arcadia in Phoenix. In reality what you are seeing is part of how this country has been designed, and the foundation upon which many dreams and hopes have been buried; from the indigenous people that lived here for tens of thousands of years completely sustainably and totally isolated, only to be displaced in in horrific ways; to the backs of slaves that helped build the railroads and entire economic market systems which thrust this country into power over the last 500 years. This issue has orbited this country for many years, and unfortunately our species since the beginning of time.

As a species we invade an area, send a message back to our kin and tell them to bring their tools and devices to extract the most out of a location, as quickly as possible. Today we don’t have to work nearly as hard to achieve perceived success and financial, or social security as we did 200 years ago. Not that I know personally but it seemed like things back in the day were pretty hard to come by without a little blood sweat and tears, and that’s why these communities arose in unlikely places is because people shared something with their neighbors, a common struggle. So today for someone to step up the ladder from working class, to middle class, to upper middle class, to upper class you have to “come-up.” We all know this. And unfortunately you are either going to buy something that radically increases value, buy something that is valuable and make interest on it, do something that is worth lots of capital for and people are going to give you way more than you will ever need to be happy with, or you are going to have to be a gyspy or a community originator and innovator.

In reality that is what you are Taz. You are someone who is trained in understanding what the traits of a great community are and then enjoying them to the fullest with your warm and carrying heart. The problem is that capitalism is only friends with those who want to make a profit, or more than it takes to make something, or more than what that thing is actually worth. Building a community is not about getting wealthier as a individual but about bringing a community up together. The sleek thing that capitalism does, and what are global economy and hyper socially connected society is today, is that I can be in another place, space, and time and see that a specific community in a place far away is awesome, and is far less than what I paying, and will allow me to get rid of one or two cars without even knowing the community, or the people. In the old days they had real-estate agents go around and basically outlining the areas that were worth investment, and those that had people of color living in them, and everything in-between. These HOLC maps were funded by the United States Government HUD, and the FHA under FDR (Franklin Roosevelt), part of the “New Deal,” and they were called Residential Security Maps, also known as Redlinning. The New Deal was a pretty crazy system of rules that were directly targeted at providing jobs or assistance to those who were entitled to them by their privileged race. Things like Social Security, Marijuana Tax Act, HUD, and many more programs that were designed to exclude people from government assistance event though they were designed to be government assistance for it’s citizens. If you look around you can still see remnants of the trauma these maps created over the last 90 years. And most recently reverse Redlinning. Not to go into too much detail but you couldn’t get a loan to buy into these redlined areas, nor could you as a resident get a second on your home to make improvements. Oh for the last 50-60 years. And just before the last crash banks were going into these areas that had never given a second glance to, were giving out crazy ARM mortgages like ice cream cones, watching people default and then taking over their property.

This is a very difficult subject and their really aren’t many very many great solutions out there, nor any examples that I have seen. Rent control is not necessarily the answer in my mind. Rent control adds to the divide and also artificially allows certain people to stay at a rate that is way below market value for a period that far exceeds the reality of the world around them. I have seen this in various places where you have a business professional renting a space out for $800/month right next to a place that is the same size that is going for $4000/month. I do put a lot of the blame in zoning and planning ordinances. I also blame HUD/FHA for a lot of this mess because before the FHA you had to come up with cash to buy a house, after the HUD/HOLC/FHA you could get a loan. This increased the price of ticky tack and wood, thus increased the cost of homes, and all down the line. Similarly to college tution and how because of the access to loans (future income, future money you don’t have today) the price has sky rocketed, the same for homes. How much do you think your homes are really worth in raw materials? Probably a lot less than you can imagine.

In the city I work in but don’t live I have seen some of the largest, craziest and most expensive real-estate developments projects progress at a insane speed over the last two years then I have seen or heard of in many places. Most of the development is happening in the areas that can charge the highest rates ($30/sqft and much more), which means higher income for the city. The areas where most of the people live have strict height limits (<=40 feet), lots sizes and development protocols that disable people from being able to develop in other areas, where the market actually exists. This sort of zoning and planning guidance is distributing the development throughout an amazing city quit disproportionally towards international investment groups.

So you really only have a few options; you can buy into a community, be a transient with only a digital ghost of a community through rent or leasing, or get a tent and go Into the Wild and take Eddie Vedder with you and say the heck with Society. Communities that base themselves on the value of their property are mostly shallow and still searching for belonging just like everyone else. Finding great communities and people is one of your talents but the unfortunate aspect of our design is that everything has a value, and as an American business person your goal is to make as much as quickly as possible, while increasing your margin, and sending your offspring to that good school on the hill. When people realize that our individual value is not measured in what we can buy but what we give back then we will all be able to share a locally harvest meal together, play some loud music, and share our interests goals and talents openly with love.

A really interesting book that you can’t find anywhere for some reason is called “Black Wealth/White Wealth” by Melvin Oliver, Thomas Shapiro. I highly recommend it. There are some great statistics as well as some interesting pieces of history that were left out of your history books, overall a great book.

Sorry guys, but no one that writes this in their article, ” I have loved living in this neighborhood because this experience is precisely why I moved to Portland – the walkability, bike-ability and the vibrancy that comes along with those two things.” Gets to complain about rent going up in Portland, because YOU are the reason rent is going up in this neighborhood. It’s like saying, “I know I pooped in your backyard, but you know what I hate? Stepping in poop in your backyard!” You can’t cause a problem then ridiculously complain about the problem. Unless you think the reason rent is gong up isn’t because a bunch or wealthy hipsters move here and live in our neighborhood and pay the overpriced rent to push out people that have lived here for years…